Editors note: Surprisingly, we have never posted anything about Reddit. Well it’s high time that changed! As someone who has never used the platform, this article has opened my eyes to a new content source. I want to learn more!

Reddit: Does This Platform Deserve Your 2nd Look?

The most pressing issue with content marketing is constantly coming up with fresh things to talk about. In fact, if you look at any of the popular blogs on the internet, you will observe that in most instances, you are perfectly capable of generating content that is equally rich in quality and information. If you are reading this, then you might be wondering what is stopping millions of people from interacting with your content when it is virtually no different in quality from other popular content present on the internet.

The problem almost certainly does not have anything to do with the kind or the amount of information you share. The real problem is with WHAT you share. It is imperative that your target audience finds your content useful for it to perform. Which brings us back to square one ‘What do I write about?’

The answer lies with your target audience. While there are numerous sources of inspiration available across the web, you need to look for it in places where your target audience usually hangs out. One such community is Reddit. As surprising as it may sound, Reddit is a treasure trove of content ideas. Most marketers view Reddit as a great platform for advertising, owing it to its immense reach of 234 million unique users as of November 2016. The website currently ranks at number 7 in the USA and at number 23, worldwide, in terms of traffic.

Reddit Is a Treasure Trove

The bad news is, the Reddit community despises blatant advertising. One might think, what is it good for then?

Don’t give up on Reddit before you even try it! With that many users, and over 11,000 communities based around niche topics, Reddit is one of the best-kept secrets in content generation research. Let us see how you can use Reddit to find great content ideas.

Keeping Up With The Trends

Reddit might be the most pop-culture influenced website present on the internet. The communities and subreddit conversations often turn into viral internet sensations. Anything can go viral on Reddit.

For instance, the most viral post on Reddit was ironically a test post by a user name ‘ggyh2’. The post garnered over 21,000 upvotes on Reddit and instantly went viral across the internet. Here is a screenshot of the post:

Subreddits are mini communities within Reddit. Almost every industry and niche has their own. What does that mean for you? It means Reddit has a myriad of niche communities that constantly interact with each other about things that matter to them. Here is a screenshot of r/Entrepreneur subreddit:

Create an account and subscribe to maximum subreddits that fall in your niche.

Once subscribed, the conversations on those subreddits will be displayed in your news feed. Identify relevant conversations, observe what your audience is talking about.

Find inspiration from questions, conversations, or even other articles that you think you can improve.

Upload the content through your social media.

Return to Reddit for a fresh set of ideas.

Finding out what your audience wants to talk about

As stated earlier, the problem usually is not with the quality of content. Instead, the problem whether your content has something the audience is looking for. To find out what your audience wants to talk about, Reddit can be used in the following ways:

The first way to do this is quite simple, actually. Simply find content that is performing well, and rewrite it… only better. Since the content you chose is already performing well, audiences will surely appreciate an improved version of the same content.

To do this, sort the relevant subreddit so that it displays the top performing results first. Choose the threads you think you can improve. Use one of them as inspiration for your next piece of content.

The second way to find topics is a little more tedious. Go to a relevant subreddit, and start looking for questions. Don’t just stop at the subreddit page. Scan every thread for questions in the comments and replies to those comments as well. Keep in mind that you only choose threads that have a high level of interaction going on. This can be checked through the points displayed on the left column. Most of the time, you will find that top comments on a question thread are answers. But the replies to these comments are often in the form of more questions.

Subreddit page for entrepreneurs

Questions found in the comments and replies

You have your question list. Now what?

Once you have created a big list of questions (preferably more than 100), you can start turning them into content ideas. The long list of questions provides you with enough freedom to skip the topics you are not confident writing about.

For instance, the question “How did you make it from an idea to a finished product?” can be turned into “comprehensive guide to turning your million-dollar idea into a real product.”

Since the audience is already talking about these things, answering their queries is a great idea for useful and interactive content.

Finding Keywords

If you are looking to drive search traffic through your content, the above-mentioned method might not bring about results. That is simply because the content you decided on creating may or may not contain the necessary keywords to drive traffic.

I found this great tool that lets you identify keywords in specific subreddits that have actual search volume. All you have to do is add the name of the relevant subreddit, customise your search in terms of search type, time frame, relevance and frequency, then hit enter. Keyworddit will go through every thread and comment section, identify keywords and runs it through a keyword search tool Grepwords. This displays top performing keywords that have real search volume. It is advised to run the results through another keyword tool to eliminate errors and get high performing, relevant keywords.

Most of the time, Keywords are the easiest to turn into content ideas. For instance, the top keyword for your search was “SEO for beginners”, you can easily turn this into “Detailed guide to SEO for beginners”.

Crowdsourcing Surveys and Ideas

Reddit is a great platform for research. The presence of subreddits makes Reddit all the more advantageous when you want to crowdsource your ideas, surveys, or even content for that matter.

One way to do so is to take out a Sponsored Ad for your research efforts. This would be much cheaper as compared to other social media platforms and would provide you with real-time, insightful data. This can be used for things such as:

Gathering opinions about of new or an existing idea

Getting customer feedback on your product or service

The second approach is to directly post or comment in a thread. If you have something useful and unique to offer, you will be able to easily gather data, as well as, crowdsource content in the form of quotes and opinions. Keep in mind that you are walking a very fine line when you do this. DO NOT advertise your product or service! The Reddit community despises blatant advertising!

Conclusion

When used smartly and effectively, Reddit can act as a great source of inspiration for generating quality content that resonates with your target audience. It is a virtually never-ending source for content ideas. Creating and marketing great content requires a lot more than just writing and hitting the ‘upload’ button, it requires you to be constantly involved and informed about the things your target audience wants to talk about. And Reddit is one of the best places to do so.

If you have any other ideas of generating content ideas from Reddit, please make sure you share them with the rest of us in the comments below.

Sign up for the newest articles from Curatti, delivered straight to your inbox

Vaibhav Kakkar

Vaibhav Kakkar is Co-Founder and Chief Growth Officer at RankWatch and NotifyFox, Software Solutions that help digital marketers perform better. Apart from helping businesses succeed online and writing about Internet Marketing, he spends time digging deep into the beautiful world of search engine algorithms. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.